Welding systems reside at the core of the modem industrial age. From massive automobile assembly operations to automated manufacturing environments, these systems facilitate joining in ever more complicated manufacturing operations. One such example of a welding system includes an electric arc welding system. This may involve movement of a consumable electrode, for example, toward a work piece while current is passed through the electrode and across an arc developed between the electrode and the work piece. The electrode may be a non-consumable or consumable type, wherein portions of the electrode may be melted and deposited on the work piece. Often, hundreds or perhaps thousands of welders are employed to drive multiple aspects of an assembly process, wherein sophisticated controllers enable individual welders to operate within relevant portions of the process. For example, some of these aspects relate to control of power and waveforms supplied to the electrode, movements or travel of a welding tip during welding, electrode travel to other welding points, gas control to protect a molten weld pool from oxidation at elevated temperatures and provide ionized plasma for an arc, and other aspects such as arc stability to control the quality of the weld. These systems are often deployed over great distances in larger manufacturing environments and many times are spread across multiple manufacturing centers. Given the nature and requirements of modern and more complex manufacturing operations however, welding systems designers, architects and suppliers face increasing challenges in regard to upgrading, maintaining, controlling, servicing and supplying various welding locations. Unfortunately, many conventional welding systems operate in individually controlled and somewhat isolated manufacturing locations in regard to the overall joining, fabrication and/or other production process. Thus, controlling, maintaining, servicing and supplying multiple and isolated locations in large centers, and/or across the globe, has become more challenging, time consuming and expensive.
One such challenge relates to providing relevant and/or current technical information to welding system operators. This information can be in a variety of forms such as service manuals, training and operating manuals, troubleshooting manuals, schematics, and/or any information relating to operating and servicing the welding system. The information is often stored in document or manual form and generally remains unchanged after initial shipment and installment of the welding system. If a problem occurs with the welder, or if routine maintenance is to be performed, and/or if a new/current operator needs more specific information to perform new or different welding tasks, this information generally has to be retrieved manually by the operator from a file cabinet or other filing location that may not even be located on the production floor. Valuable time is then generally expended searching for the necessary documents. The time expended may include searching through documents of unrelated welding systems that service other portions of the production process. Even after a manual or document location is found, there is substantially no assurance that the retrieved document provides the latest or most recent information for a particular welding system. For example, the welding system may have undergone several upgrades (e.g. application software enhancements, welding program changes, weld controller firmware changes, hardware component changes) before an operator needs to perform a service procedure such as troubleshoot and replace a faulty welding component. If an older manual is retrieved that does not reflect the current state of the welding system, however, faulty diagnosis may occur. Consequently, this may lead to expensive troubleshooting costs and other costs relating to purchasing incorrect components that may not in fact be defective. Thus, extra welding system downtime may occur because of incorrect diagnosis and selection of non-defective replacement parts.
Once a component has been determined for replacement by a weld system operator or technician, another costly and time-consuming procedure generally follows. This involves ordering and purchasing the suspected defective component or part. The operator generally has to look-up the part in a manual, find the related part number, determine who supplies the part, and look the part up in a supplier's catalog. When the supplier has been determined, a phone call or FAX is placed to determine availability and price information, and then a purchase order is generated and transmitted to the supplier to fulfill the order. Assuming that the part has been entered correctly by the purchaser and processed correctly by the supplier, the part may then arrive at the welder wherein a replacement can then occur. Unfortunately, the above process involves many time-consuming and manual steps—sometimes involving error. Thus, much time can be expended receiving inadequate or incorrect replacement parts. If many welders are serviced by many different operators in this manner, as is often the case in larger welding environments, these problems become magnified.
Due to the problems described above and other problems associated with conventional welding systems, there is an unsolved need for an improved welding architecture to facilitate remote information transfers and parts distribution to multiple welding systems that may be distributed across large areas or regions.